Their debut album Silent Alarm was nominated for the 2005 Mercury Music Prize and won the NME award for 'Best Album'. Coming from the same place Franz were 12 months ago – slightly off the radar but within its catchment… right? Their brand of music, whilst rooted in rock, retains elements of other genres such as electronica and house music. Silent Alarm is the debut full length from UK indie rock band Bloc Party, released on 2 February 2005 in Japan and 14 February 2005 worldwide.

Moakes joined the band after answering an advert in NME magazine, while Tong was picked via an audition. The double A-side " So Here We Are/Positive Tension", " Banquet" and " The Pioneers" were released as singles.Okerere has a voice that's weirdly similar to the singer from the long-forgotten Adorable, with whom Bloc Party share a hell of a lot more than an appreciation for the Bunnymen: It's a vaguely-strangled back-of-throat thing that lets him moan and shout with refreshing gusto when the band gets going. It was voted 'Album of the Year' for 2005 by NME, [13] and reached number 3 on the UK Albums Chart before being certified platinum. They find “rock star behaviour completely abhorrent” (they’ll turn down that invite to Kate Moss’ next birthday party) and in that respect they’re the complete opposite of The Libertines.

Not because they are all these things (though they are a lot of them), nor because they’re all things to all men (in fact they’re the complete opposite). The band members played their first concerts in Australia in July and spent the whole of August on the European festivals circuit. citation needed] Some of the new material would feature on The Nextwave Sessions, an EP announced on 25 June and for release on 12 August via Frenchkiss Records. The songs were released as a single with a B-side, titled " Two More Years", [22] to coincide with the band's October 2005 UK tour. But when you break it down, this union is a perfect example of exactly how far both indie and mainstream rock has come.Silent Alarm's not 100% filler-free - the forgettable 'So Here We Are' could have slipped out the back with little protest - but the autonomy, creativity and sheer, elastic beauty that spans this debut more than justifies the rapidly accelerating hype that Bloc Party are currently generating. Erol Alkan's reworking of debut single " She's Hearing Voices" is a dub version over twice the length of the blueprint.

Pitchfork Media's Nitsuh Adebe was impressed with the album and indicated that it is "surprisingly good, and surprisingly often". Okereke was a fan of hip-hop producer Timbaland (see the band’s excellent 2009 Live Lounge cover of Nelly Furtado’s Say It Right), and his omnivorous tastes meant that Bloc Party appealed to the open-minded listener, whether they were a hardened Gang of Four fan or a desert scarf-wearing, glowstick-toting underage raver. By 2016’s Hymns, that rhythm section (bassist Gordon Moakes and drummer Matt Tong) had quit the band, leaving frontman Kele Okereke and guitarist Russell Lissack to craft a weird franken-child of gospel, dance, and stadium rock by their lonesomes. Helicopter" has a quick tempo of 171 beats per minute, while "Positive Tension" begins with a solitary bassline and builds up pace, first with a rhythmic drumming pattern, and then with a guitar solo towards its conclusion.

I thought, that'd be cool, to make music that people might not get at the time, but in ten years' time, people would revisit it. Okereke tried to convey the feelings in a failing relationship, "of being completely disorientated", using childhood metaphors.

This Modern Love" begins minimally with panned vocals before the rhythm section enters the mix and the song intensifies.

Put it like that, and what Bloc Party actually sound like drops pretty low on the list of things you need to know about Silent Alarm. The record includes reworked versions of all original tracks by artists such as Ladytron, Death From Above 1979, and Nick Zinner from Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Bloc Party started writing material for a fourth album in 2011, [72] [73] but decided not to play live. This is a solid, intelligent album that a lot of people will love-- one that'll slot onto indie-crossover CD racks right beside the debuts from Interpol, Franz Ferdinand, and the Futureheads. Bloc Party EP was subsequently released by Moshi Moshi Records in the UK, containing all three previous songs and new material.